The Accident (34 page)

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Ely, he was always there for me. He protected me. He watched out for me. No one does that for me now. I just, I just wanted to be protected from something, to have someone doing the protecting …”

“So you made up that story, so I …”

Joan tried to look at me but she couldn’t. “It felt so nice, you know?” Her face crumpled and more tears trickled. “Knowing you were there? That I could call on you?”

“You can call on me,” I said. “For something real.”

“And the other thing is, I wanted to look after someone. Ely, he looked out for me, but I looked out for him, too. And now, after what you’ve gone through, you need that. You need someone to look after you. I thought … I thought I could do that for you. And the other thing I said, about the money that’s coming, that’s true, I swear to God. I’ve got a big settlement coming.”

I was about to take a couple of steps closer to her, but held my distance. This had the feeling of something that could go very wrong very quickly if I allowed it to.

“Joan,” I said gently, “you’re a good person. A kind person.”

“I noticed you didn’t say ‘woman.’ ”

“You’re that, no question,” I said. “But … I don’t want this. It’s not just with you, but with anyone. I’m not ready. I’m a long, long way from ready. I don’t have any idea when that will be. The only thing I care about now, the only thing I’m looking after now, is my girl.”

“Sure,” Joan said. “I get that.”

We both stood there another moment. Finally, Joan said, “I’m going to go, okay?”

“Sure.”

She started for the door.

“Joan,” I said.

She stopped, and there was this ever-so-slightly hopeful look on her
face, that maybe I’d reconsidered, that I wanted to deal with my loneliness and loss and grief the same way she did, that I would hold her in my arms, take her upstairs, and in the morning, she would make me breakfast just the way she did for Ely.

“The key,” I said.

She blinked. “Oh yeah, okay.” She fished it out of her pocket, placed it on the kitchen table, and left.

How many other times, I wondered, had Joan let herself into the house when I wasn’t here, and what might she have been up to?

I also wondered, for a moment, if she’d be interested in a business teacher I knew.

FORTY-ONE

As I ate the cheese and crackers and drank the beer, I tried to get my head around the other events of this day.

Sommer’s visit. The sixty-two thousand dollars Belinda had wanted Sheila to deliver to him. The crappy electrical parts that had caused the fire in the house I’d been building. The showdown with Theo Stamos. Finding the knockoff parts in the back of Doug Pinder’s truck.

My head was spinning. There was so much information—and at the same time, so little—that I didn’t know how to process it. My fatigue level didn’t help. There had been too many sleepless nights.

I finished my beer and picked up the phone. Before I crashed, I needed to be sure Kelly was okay.

I speed-dialed her cell number. It rang twice before she answered.

“Hi, Daddy. I was just about to go to bed and was hoping it was you.”

“How’s it going, sweetheart?”

“Okay. Kind of boring. Grandma’s wondering if we should drive to Boston for something to do. At first I wanted to go but I really just want to come home. I thought maybe if I came here I wouldn’t be so sad but Grandma is sad so it’s kind of hard not to be. But she says there’s a big aquarium there. It’s like the Googleheim. You know, the museum where you start up at the top floor and you keep going around and around until you get to the first floor? The aquarium is like that. It’s this big tank and you start at the top and keep going until you get to the bottom.”

“Sounds like fun. Is she there? Your grandmother?”

“Hang on.”

Some fumbling. “Yes, Glen.”

“Hi. Everything okay?”

“Everything is fine. Is there something you wanted?”

“I just wanted to be sure Kelly was okay.”

“She is. I guess she told you we’re talking about whether to take a trip.”

“Boston.”

“But I don’t know if I’m up to it.”

“Just let me know what you decide,” I said. Fiona passed the phone back to Kelly so I could say good night.

A second later, the phone rang. I picked up without glancing at the caller ID. “Hello?”

“Glen?” A man.

“Who’s this?”

“Glen, it’s George Morton. I wonder if you might be able to meet me for a drink.”

He was waiting for me in a booth at a place over in Devon. It was a bit down-market for George, but maybe he wanted a place he thought would suit me.

A couple of tables away from the booth were four young guys. If they’d been carded, I had to guess their IDs were borrowed from older friends. But this seemed to be the kind of place where they didn’t worry much about that kind of thing.

George made no move to stand as I arrived. He let me slip in opposite him. My jeans got caught on sticky spots as I shifted in. George was dressed casually this time, a button-down shirt and a denim jacket. There was a bottle of Heineken in front of him.

“Thanks for coming,” he said.

“You didn’t want to say what this was about when you called,” I said.

“It’s not the sort of thing to discuss over the phone, Glen. Can I get you a beer first?”

“Sure.”

George caught the waitress’s eye and I asked for a Sam Adams. George sat with his hands on the table, folded together, his arms forming a defensive V around his beer.

“This is your meeting, George,” I reminded him.

“Tell me about that envelope full of cash you delivered to my house.”

“If you know about it, but you don’t know what it’s for, that tells me Belinda hasn’t told you. But she told you it was from me?”

“I saw you put it through the mail slot,” he said.

I glanced over at the table with the boys. They were starting to whoop it up. They had three pitchers of beer on the table and their glasses had been filled.

“Well, there you go. Anything else you want to know, ask Belinda.”

“She’s not very forthcoming. All she’ll say is the money is a down payment on a property. Are you buying another property, Glen? Tearing down a house and putting up a new one on the site? Reason I ask is, I had the sense things were a bit tight for you right now.”

The waitress delivered my beer and I took a sip. “Look, George, I don’t know where you get the idea I owe you a favor or an explanation for anything. I understand you’re the one who persuaded Belinda to open up to the Wilkinson lawyers, to tell them Sheila had the odd drink and once smoked pot with your wife and—”

“If you read the transcript of my wife’s statement closely, you’ll see that it says Sheila smoked marijuana in my wife’s presence, but it does not state that Belinda was also smoking it.”

“Oh, I see. So you don’t mind tearing my wife down, but you’re careful to protect yours at the same time. Did the Wilkinson woman promise you a cut if she gets everything I own? Is that how it went down?”

“I was doing what I thought was right.” He unclasped his hands, extended an arm and tapped the table dramatically with his index finger. “Here’s a woman who’s lost her husband and a child, and you want my wife to lie and deny them justice?”

“If my wife had a history as a pothead and a record for driving around stoned, you might be on to something, George. But she had no history, and she didn’t drive around stoned. So blow your self-righteous crap out your ass.”

He blinked furiously. “I believe in doing things right. I believe people need to live up to a certain standard. And envelopes stuffed with cash, without any explanation, that’s just not the way one does business.”

Three of the boys were chanting
“Chug! Chug! Chug!”
as the fourth downed a glass of draft in a matter of seconds. They refilled his glass and started chanting again.

I looked back at George, down at his tapping finger, then suddenly dropped a hand down on his extended arm, pinning it to the table. George’s eyes opened wide. He tried to pull his hand away but he couldn’t do it.

“Let’s talk about standards,” I told him. “What sort of standards would a man have to have to let a woman other than his wife slap some handcuffs on him?”

When he’d stuck out his arm, I’d gotten a good look at his wrist. It was red and angry, all the way around. In a couple of spots, the skin was just beginning to heal, as though it had been scraped recently.

It was, I knew, a stab in the dark. But George Morton was within Ann Slocum’s circle. And Ann, in that snippet of video I’d seen, wasn’t exactly talking to a total stranger.

“Stop it!” he whispered, still trying to wriggle free. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Tell me how you got those marks. You’ve got two seconds.”

“I—I—”

“Too long.”

“You just, you caught me off guard. I did that—I did that working in the garden.”

“Both wrists, same marks? What kind of gardening injury was this?”

George was stammering, none of the words making any sense.

I let go of his hand and wrapped mine back around my beer. “Ann Slocum did that to you, didn’t she?”

“I don’t know what you’re—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he blustered.

“Since you’re all about being honest and forthright, why don’t I ask Belinda to join us, save you having to tell this story twice.” I started reaching for my phone.

He reached out and held my arm, giving me an even better look at the marks. “Please.”

I pushed his hand away but didn’t go for the phone. “Tell me.”

“Oh my God,” he whimpered. “Oh my God.”

I waited.

“I can’t believe Ann would have told Sheila this,” he moaned. “And that Sheila would tell you. That’s how you found out, right?”

I smiled knowingly. Why tell him I’d learned about this from my daughter’s cell phone, and from what she’d taken from Ann Slocum’s
purse? Try explaining
that
, I thought. And the truth was, for all I knew, Ann
had
told Sheila about this, although I seriously doubted it.

“So you know,” he said. “I can’t believe Ann told her. That she would admit to what she was doing. Oh my God, if Ann told Sheila, she could have told …”

He had his face in his hands. He looked like he was going to have an instant nervous breakdown. “You don’t know how long I’ve been living with this, worried that someone … anyone might find out that …”

“Tell me,” I said, sitting there, looking as smug as a goddamn Buddha.

It came out in a torrent. “Ann needed money. They were always running short, her and Darren, even with selling purses on the side. I’d always found her … compelling. Attractive. Very … forceful. She could tell, she could tell I was interested. I wasn’t the one who suggested it. I never could have done that. But she asked to meet me for coffee one time, and she … made a proposal.”

“A business proposal,” I said.

“That’s right. We met, a couple of times at a motel here in Milford, but that seemed a little too risky, being right in town, so we started going to a Days Inn in New Haven.”

“So you paid her to handcuff you, and …?”

He looked away from me. “We kind of worked up to that. At first, it was just, you know, regular sex.”

“Things not good at home, George?”

He shook his head, unwilling to get into it. “I just … I just wanted something different.”

“What’d you pay her?”

“Three hundred, each time.”

“I guess none of this came up when you were at the lawyer’s office offering up judgments on my wife’s character,” I said. “Although I don’t know why it would. Totally different things, really.”

“Glen, look, I’m asking for your complete discretion here, you get that, right?”

“Oh, sure.”
You stupid son of a bitch
.

“The thing is, she wanted more.”

“She upped her rates?”

“Not exactly,” he said. I took a sip of my cold beer and gave him a
minute. “Ann said it’d be a terrible thing if Belinda ever found out. First time she said it, I thought, Yeah, I totally agree. Second time she said it, I realized what she was getting at. She wanted more money to keep quiet. I thought she’d never tell. That’d be crazy. She and Belinda were friends, had been a long time, and if she told, it would all come out, Darren would find out—”

“Darren didn’t know?” That did make sense, given Ann’s orders to Kelly to keep quiet about what she’d heard.

“He didn’t know anything about it. I really didn’t think she’d ever tell, but I didn’t want to take the chance. The thing was,” and his voice got very quiet, “she took a picture, once, with her camera phone, when I was, you know, hooked up to the bed. Just me in the shot. She said, wouldn’t it be funny, if somehow that got emailed to Belinda. I’m not even sure she actually took the picture. She might have been faking, but I just didn’t know. So I started giving her an extra hundred each time, and that seemed to satisfy her, until, well …”

“Until she was dead.”

“Yeah.”

The boy who’d been chugging beer had stopped. “I can’t do any more,” he protested, laughing. “I can’t.”

“Wanna bet?” one of his friends said. One grabbed him from behind, a second held his head, and the third put the pitcher right to his lips. He started tipping and beer slipped down the boy’s chin and all over his shirt. But a lot of it seemed to be going down his throat, judging by the way his Adam’s apple was bobbing.

The boy was going to be very drunk, very soon. I just hoped these clowns weren’t planning to drive—

“When she had that accident,” George said, “I was stunned, you know? I felt sick, and I couldn’t believe it. But part of me, I hate to say this, a part of me was relieved.”

“Relieved.”

“She didn’t have any hold on me anymore.”

“Unless that picture’s really out there somewhere. On her phone.”

“I keep praying it’s at the bottom of the harbor. Every day that goes by, and the police don’t get in touch …”

I said, “You might get lucky on that score.”

“Yeah, I hope.”

I poked the inside of my cheek with my tongue. “I’ve got a favor to ask of you, George.”